Behind the tropes and clichés, what is horror? What purpose do horror stories serve? Horror reveals impulses in ourselves which we fear and do not understand, such as the savage motives behind murder. For example: 2006's
Black Dahlia (directed by
Brian De Palma) was based on the 1947 unsolved
murder of Elizabeth Short, and was disturbing enough that writer
James Ellroy (who famously wrote a
quartet of novels about post-war L.A., and included the Dahlia case
for his own reasons)
now asserts that he will
never again publicly discuss Short (see my blog post on this case,
here); or
the original
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974; based on the 1950s'
Ed Gein case in Wisconsin, see it below); or
Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986; see it
here; based on real life killers
Henry Lee Lucas and
Ottis Toole). In a week when the
LAPD is reopening the Manson Family case to investigate 12 additional murders, the headlines remind us that reality is worse than any horror drama.
Horror additionally asks us to
challenge what we understand to be real and then reaffirm it, according to our common values. A Catholic review from Jake Martin of a fictional account of a boy who kills his classmates,
We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011), confirms this point:
the film is not "yet another installment in the pantheon of
post-modern films intent upon assaulting the human desire to give meaning to the world." Instead, ... [Martin] says,
We Need to Talk about Kevin in fact needs to be talked about, as what it is attempting to do by marrying the darkest, most
nihilistic components of contemporary cinema with a redemptive message is groundbreaking."
In a third and related sense, some
horror stories are actually morality tales. They show the path the protagonists must take out of darkness, once a violent act has ripped apart everything that makes reality sensible. This severe trope is often used by director
David Lynch, whose forays into surreal horror involve
a return back to a good piece of cherry pie and a great cup of coffee. Lynch will take his audiences to the edge and well beyond it, but he always insists on the final reassertion of sanity over insanity.
